Stopping Place

I was listening to all the words you said
Twisting them around my brain
The way you drink through a shiny twisted straw
I was gargling them around my brain like mouthwash
Sometimes they make sense
And other times I know
I am not the girl in the storefront
Gold and covered in expensive materials
In the best light, on the best day
I walk a little faster than lightening strikes
My lips are less like sandpaper and more like
A musical instrument
A secret whisper I felt against my cheek
I needed to escape into some sort of embrace
Something to muffle out that negative
Thoughts of being parentless of walking this world
Like a lonely ghost
Lorraine Warren came to my school on Friday
To talk about close encounters with the supernatural
I wasn’t able to make it
Too many people that I used to love have dug their heads into the dirt
To sleep forever
Too many things frighten me
So that I become a tiny whisper against cotton sheets
My eyes become an after-thought
My life seems a mystery
A mathematical equation with
No square root
No stopping place
A pencil mark that fades onto white parchment
Somewhere in Mr. and Mrs. Lange’s backyard
When their children were just barely six and ten
A rabbit flew by the window in the den
Into some bushes or out in to the endless field
Perhaps it made it to the highway and got hit by a Ford pickup
Or maybe it’s waiting for me still
Around the bend